Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-81626-7 - The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction
Edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn
Excerpt
More information
FA R A H M E N D L E S O H N
Introduction: reading science fiction
The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction is intended to provide readers
with an introduction to the genre and to its study. To this end, we have divided
this book into three parts: an historical overview of the field which discusses
the major authors and editors, the people and market forces which have
shaped the literary structures of the field; a section on critical approaches to
science fiction (sf); and finally a collection of essays exploring some of the
issues and concerns which have been considered by both critics and writers
to be intrinsic to the genre. The first language of all of the contributors is
English, and the book concentrates almost entirely on the English-language
sf that has, for the last century, dominated the field.
The structure we have adopted makes a number of assumptions: it assumes
that you, the reader, know what sf is, and that everyone who has contributed
to this book shares the same criteria. This second statement is the more contentious. Science fiction is less a genre – a body of writing from which one can
expect certain plot elements and specific tropes – than an ongoing discussion.
Its texts are mutually referential, may be written by those active in criticism
(something we have tried to reflect) and have often been generated from the
same fan base which supports the market. The reader’s expectations of sf
are governed less by what happens than how that happening is described,
and by the critical tools with which the reader is expected to approach the
text. Yet the critical tools are themselves contentious: sf is a battleground
between different groups of fans, and different groups of critics. When this
book is reviewed, some will object to the number of thematic essays we have
included, and others will object to the assertion, contained in a number of
essays, that sf emerges in the twentieth century, preferring to include within
the definition texts written in the nineteenth or earlier centuries. These objections emerge from the very nature of the beast that is sf: a mode of writing
which has seemed to exist at variance from the standards and demands of
both the literary establishment and the mass market (because, whatever else
it is, sf literature is not popular, even while ‘sci-fi’ movies pack the cinemas).
1
© in this web service Cambridge University Press
www.cambridge.org
Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-81626-7 - The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction
Edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn
Excerpt
More information
Introduction
Alongside these issues is the absence of any specific textual analysis in this
book. Because sf is a discussion, a collection of essays on ‘representative’
texts would in many ways have been unrepresentative: too much sf is written as an argument with the universe to allow some of the best works to be
filleted from their context, and this is evidenced by the extent to which certain names crop up repeatedly in the essays. Only where a specific canon of
texts has emerged around a particular theme or mode have our contributors
been able to offer sustained textual analysis.
But the case can be made that the best way to understand what sf is, is to
map our theories on to an exemplar text, a text that demonstrates the theories
from which many of the critics contributing to this book proceed. Rather
than make sweeping statements about the nature of sf based primarily on the
classics – ideas which might be challenged by the most recent contributions
to the field, and which would rapidly reveal that most sf texts only perform
perhaps two-thirds of the theoretical demands which we impose on sf – we
shall begin this Companion by examining those ideas which structure sf as
demonstrated in a very specific text by one of the best contemporary authors:
Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder (2002).1 This hard sf space opera is curiously
susceptible to such mapping. It contains within it the very history of the
genre, the ideas which underpin the critical discourse. Let us start with the
one idea that most often baffles colleagues in genre criticism: that sf is a
discussion or a mode, and not a genre.
If sf were a genre, we would know the rough outline of every book that we
picked up. If it were a mystery, we would know that there was ‘something
to be found out’; if a romance, that two people would meet, make conflict
and fall in love; if horror, that there would be an intrusion of the unnatural into the world that would eventually be tamed or destroyed. But Egan’s
Schild’s Ladder offers all three of these outlines. Cass, a scientist, wants to
find out whether the mathematical equations named after Sarumpaet hold
true; Tchicaya, many years later, is driven to find out what is on the other
side of the disruptive border that Cass’s disastrous experiment has created.
If this is not enough to match the book with the mystery genre, it becomes
imperative two-thirds of the way in to discover who has sabotaged Rindler,
the investigative space station, and the novel is instantly recognizable as a
‘thriller’. The border itself offers horror: will our protagonists succeed in
holding back the new universe before it devours Earth? This is an sf novel,
not a film, so there is not necessarily the happy resolution demanded by
Hollywood: authors such as Stephen Baxter and John Barnes have become
notorious for killing off the human race. And finally there is the romance
between Tchicaya and Mariama: childhood sweethearts, separated for almost seven hundred years, their romance would be at the heart of many
2
© in this web service Cambridge University Press
www.cambridge.org
Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-81626-7 - The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction
Edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn
Excerpt
More information
Introduction
novels. But this is sf, and as I shall show later, romance means something
very different in sf.
Having demonstrated that sf is quite happy to extract its plot structures
from any available genre, and thus each individual book could potentially be
identified with one of these genres rather than with sf, we need to consider
whether sf does ‘own’ a narrative. It is rarely considered in these terms, but
if sf does have an immediately recognizable narrative it is centred on what
has been termed the ‘sense of wonder’.
The sense of wonder is the emotional heart of sf. David Nye has described
this reaction as the appreciation of the sublime whether natural, such as
the rings of Saturn, or technological: a space station or rocket ship (see
Gwyneth Jones, chapter 11 in this volume).2 For the first fifteen years of the
development of genre sf (from the mid-1920s), it was the basic narrative
of most fiction in the US magazines, as the titles – Amazing, Astounding,
Thrilling Wonder – suggest. The earliest sf relied on the creation of a new
invention, or an arrival in a new place. For the readers of this material
this was enough; one could stand and stare at the flying city, or gasp at
the audacity of the super-weapon. The tone was primarily descriptive, the
protagonist unfamiliar with his/her surroundings describing to the reader, or
auditing a lecture on our behalf. Almost all stories ended either in universal
peace or with the destruction of invention and inventor because the writers
either lacked the skill to go beyond the idea and employed the explosion as
the sf equivalent of ‘I woke up and it was all a dream’, perhaps in order to
avoid any sense of consequence; John Clute has argued that the secret is that
‘Doc’ Smith and his peers – and A. E. Van Vogt, who walked alone – may
have loved the task of conceiving futures, but, at the same time, each of these
sf writers manifestly displayed a very deep distrust and fear of anything that
hinted at any of the unfolding ‘real’ futures that have refilled the water holes
of our infancy with mutagens. The Lensmen series is escapist, as much good
fiction is; and we love it for that, but it does not escape 1930, it escapes the
future.3
The result was a sense of wonder combined with presentism. But this core
sense of wonder continues to power sf. The first thirty-five pages of Schild’s
Ladder are self-contained: a classic short story, emulating the achievements
of early sf, and exemplifying the fundamental role of the sense of wonder in
the construction of what we mean by sf. For the sake of a theorem Cass has
her mind sent 370 light years from Earth and embodied in a form 2mm high.
The plot is deceptively simple: Cass seeks the help of aliens to test a proof of
Sarumpaet’s mathematical theory in the safety of deep space. Older and wiser
than we, they counsel caution and break the experiment down into fifteen
3
© in this web service Cambridge University Press
www.cambridge.org
Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-81626-7 - The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction
Edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn
Excerpt
More information
Introduction
smaller experiments. When they finally permit the entire experiment to be
enacted, it still goes wrong and the resulting ‘explosion’ begins to swallow
the universe. And the ‘short-story’ ends. In the tradition of that early genre
sf we have the sense of wonder (the possibilities of maths); the wise aliens
(although in this case they are post-humans); the show of hubris; and the cold
equations of the universe, the traditional sf substitute for divine punishment,
halting human ingenuity in its tracks. Small points of wonder – the size to
which Cass is reduced, the body which can live on light, the space station
itself – punctuate the text, ensuring that we cannot become blasé.
But there are reasons I have suggested that Schild’s Ladder is an exemplar
text. Science fiction has not remained static. As Nye argues, the sense of
wonder is itself a fragile thing, made more difficult to achieve by familiarity,
and although for a while bigger, better and more complicated inventions and
icons may supply this, the visceral response is vulnerable to ennui. Schild’s
Ladder is fascinating because it precisely maps the development from the
sense of wonder to other literary structures that, building on the sense of
wonder, become the mode of sf. The first of these is what Istvan CsicseryRonay has described as ‘the grotesque’4 but which we can think of as ‘consequences’. The sense of wonder allowed one to admire the aesthetics of the
mushroom cloud; the sense of the grotesque led the writer and reader to
consider the fall-out. Science fiction began to shift to the consideration of
consequences in the late 1930s thanks in part to the editors F. Orlin Tremaine
and John W. Campbell (see chapters 2 and 6 in this volume), and this shift
is marked in Schild’s Ladder in the opening sections of the second part. The
thought experiment, the ‘what if?’ (which Darko Suvin calls the novum),5 is
crucial to all sf, and has led to the most popular alternative interpretation
of ‘sf’: speculative fiction. It is here that sf most departs from contemporary
literature, because in sf ‘the idea’ is the hero.
Schild’s Ladder begins with a thought experiment made literal, the testing
of Sarumpaet’s theory; the main driver appears to be the consequences of
that experiment. But throughout the novel we also have the thought experiment made metaphor: physics becomes the crowbar with which we break
open the universe, the code to preserve intellect and character, in themselves
a matter of sublime beauty. One character, himself ‘mere’ digitisation made
flesh, describes how ‘“When I was ten years old, all I gave my sweetheart was
a pair of projections that turned the group of rotations in four dimensions
into principal bundles over the three-sphere”’ (p. 97). (She loved them.) All
of these descend from an apparently secondary ‘what if’, about the nature
of personality – what are the consequences of freeing ourselves from corporeality? This is actually much more challenging than the initial experiment
which threatened to destroy the universe. This kind of structure is the classic
4
© in this web service Cambridge University Press
www.cambridge.org
Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-81626-7 - The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction
Edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn
Excerpt
More information
Introduction
double bluff of sf: setting up one thought experiment within another, to force
the reader to look out of the corner of his/her eye at the context of the adventure, mystery or romance. Although the driver of many an sf novel depends
on a specific scientific problem, the structure and forms of the genre/mode
are much more embedded in this contextual issue, because while that first
thought experiment may provide the sense of the sublime, it is the combination of the hidden ‘what ifs’ and the initial thought experiment that create
what Darko Suvin has called cognitive estrangement; ‘the cognitive nucleus
of the plot codetermines the fictional estrangement itself’.6
Cognitive estrangement is tied inextricably to the encoded nature of sf: to
style, lexical invention and embedding. Cognitive estrangement is the sense
that something in the fictive world is dissonant with the reader’s experienced
world. On a superficial level this difference may be achieved by shifts of
time, place and technological scenery. But if that is all that is done, the
resultant fiction is didactic and overly descriptive. The technique common
in early sf is known contemptuously as the ‘info-dump’: a character lectures
a captive audience about something they could be expected to know but
which we do not. It is a very difficult thing to avoid, and at the moment of
conceptual breakthrough7 when the critical insight is won, and the world
is revealed as bigger or different than one thought, it can be the only tool
a writer has to convey information. Even Egan cannot resist this in Schild’s
Ladder. When the Sarumpaet theory is finally overturned, Egan is forced
to allow one character a two-page public lecture (pp. 88–9), mitigated by
allowing the point-of-view protagonist to be slightly less familiar with the
material than others in the audience, by couching this didacticism as a plea
for ‘forbearance’ on behalf of the new theory, and by allowing the point of
view to assume that others in the audience are irritated. It is a cheat, but a
clever one.
To be really effective, sf has to be subtle. Over the past seventy years the
community of sf writers has developed a tool kit, the absence or recreation of
which is usually the hallmark of outsider sf (fiction written by professional
writers which either claims to have invented a new genre, or which vigorously
denies its categorization of science fiction). The most obvious, and the one
which newcomers to the genre notice immediately, is the use of language
in science fiction. As Gwyneth Jones argues (chapter 11), ‘the reading of a
science fiction story is always an active process of translation’.
Language is not trustworthy in sf: metaphor becomes literal. ‘He gave her
his hand’ or ‘he turned on his side’ raise numerous possibilities in the mind
of the sf reader, involving, perhaps, detachable body-parts or implanted electronics. In addition, the sf writer may set up estrangement by the deliberate
construction of new, technological metaphors such as ‘The sky above the
5
© in this web service Cambridge University Press
www.cambridge.org
Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-81626-7 - The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction
Edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn
Excerpt
More information
Introduction
port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.’8 But there is still
the expectation that one will read literally whatever is on the page, whether
‘he caught sight of an undigested stretch of calf, still bearing traces of the
last inhabitant’s body hair and musculature’ (Egan, Schild’s Ladder, p. 35)
or invented words such as ‘Qusp’. Their effectiveness in creating dissonance
relies on the expectation that the reader will either understand what is written or will fill in the gap, creating meaning where none is provided. These
two techniques are crucial to the sf project and they are cumulative. Science
fiction has come to rely on the evolution of a vocabulary, of a structure and a
set of shared ideas which are deeply embedded in the genre’s psyche. It is no
longer necessary, for example, for authors to describe the means by which
their interstellar ships are propelled across vast distances, a simple reference
to ‘FTL’ (‘faster-than-light’) will collapse several pages of description. Such
hand-waving is one of the hallmarks of hard sf (see Kathryn Cramer, chapter
13). Yet sf produces its own metaphor. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed begins:
‘There was a wall, it did not look important . . . even a child could climb
it . . . an idea of a boundary. But the idea was real . . . What was inside it and
what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.’9 Because
we are sf readers we know that this wall is going to be both a portal into
the adventure and a metaphor for narrative. In those first five lines, Le Guin
generates both estrangement and story.
Egan uses the archaeology of science fiction to seed his text with meaning. It allows him to leak information into his created world. Yann, an
acorporeal – a concept underpinned by what we might call the ‘legacy texts’10
of William Gibson and Vernor Vinge – can refer to ‘anachronauts [expected]
to arrive at the Rindler any day now – preceded by a few megatons of fusion
by-products – and announce that they’ve come to save the universe’ (Schild’s
Ladder, p. 52) and while we might not get the meaning, we know we should.
We are linked to the fusion torch-ships of Heinlein and others, can make assumptions about cryonics and are referred directly to the Terran supremacy
fiction fostered by John W. Campbell in the pages of Astounding Science
Fiction. The sf history of the universe is recapitulated in one sentence, but
the anachronauts are not fully explained for another fifty pages. We must
work to find steady ground.
But we are also being made fun of. The anachronauts are themselves an
sf legacy, what John Clute describes in chapter 4 as ‘exudations of style,
not signals of substantive shaping advocacy’. Obsessed by sex and the idea
of gender conflict they have gone from planet to planet looking for the
‘central story of the future’ (chapter 4), a narrative impervious to evidence.
Egan’s anachronauts recapitulate James Tiptree Jr’s assertion that those who
claim to protect us frequently model the phantom aggressor on themselves
6
© in this web service Cambridge University Press
www.cambridge.org
Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-81626-7 - The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction
Edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn
Excerpt
More information
Introduction
(see Veronica Hollinger, chapter 8). Until they meet Tchicaya’s father, an
adolescent too confused and in love to lie, they have been made fun of by the
descendants of humans who have told them the kind of stories used to fool
anthropologists since the days of Margaret Mead. And the anachronauts also
function as a sly dig at those critics of sf who condemn a book because it
does not conform to their particular political position, a figure not confined
to the political left.
In addition to using legacy texts to layer his world, Egan also creates
his own embedding. Our understanding of who and what the anachronauts
are is built up from small clues until the moment of breakthrough where,
in the tradition of villains everywhere, they spit their motivation into the
narrative. But equally, Egan estranges us from our assumptions about the
primary actors in the novel, building up the sense that these people are not
us. Cass, the initial protagonist, is recreated 2 mm high and ‘hermetically
sealed against the vacuum . . . Being hermetically sealed against the vacuum
and feeding on nothing but light took some getting used to’ (Schild’s Ladder,
p. 5); but the notion of body transfer is unquestioned, because in modern sf
the protagonists are not strangers in their land; they are competent within
their universe and have no need either to explain to us, or demand explanation for themselves.11 These people have a different sense of what ‘self’
is; boundaries have to be continually negotiated. ‘When the means existed
to transform yourself instantly and effortlessly, into anything at all, the only
way to maintain an identity was to draw your own boundaries. But once you
lost the urge to keep on drawing them in the right place, you might as well
have been born Homo Sapiens, with no real choices at all’(p. 6): this is a line
that effortlessly drops in the most vital information, that these people are not
humans. But as our cultural understanding of the body is not monolithic,
neither is theirs, and there are some post-humans who prefer to hang on to
their birth body, some who maintain active backups, others whose backups
are there solely in the event of death and many who prefer to live mostly
digitized, opting for bodies only to achieve specific interactions. Death has
as many different meanings in this culture as there are modes of existence.
Neither are they gendered like humans. Building on the legacies of feminist
writers, Egan has preserved gender but divorces it from the body, playing a
very neat trick by blithely using names with vowel endings for both sexes,
in contradiction to Western expectations. Our first hint of dissonance is at
the end of the flashback sequence:
between his legs, the skin was newly red and swollen . . . Touching it was like
tickling himself . . . And he could still change his mind, change his feelings.
Everything was voluntary, his father had explained. Unless you loved someone
7
© in this web service Cambridge University Press
www.cambridge.org
Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-81626-7 - The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction
Edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn
Excerpt
More information
Introduction
deeply, and unless they felt the same towards you, neither of you could grow
what you both needed to make love together . . . Every couple grew something
different, just as every couple would have a different child.
(pp. 77–8)
At this stage this sounds like nothing more than the myths parents tell
their children to protect them. The final moment of revelation must wait
until Tchicaya is taken to bed by Rasmah.
‘Oh, look what we made! I knew it would be beautiful. And I think I
have something that would fit here, almost perfectly. And here. And maybe
even . . . here!’
Tchicaya gritted his teeth, but he didn’t stop her moving her fingers over
him, inside him. There was no more vulnerable feeling than being touched
in a place that had not existed before, a place you’d never seen or touched
yourself . . .
Nature had never had much imagination, but people had always found new
ways to connect.
(pp. 161–2)
But who they choose to connect with and why is also unstable. In the first
section of the novel, Cass is destabilized because her corporeality leads her to
assume that sex is the most intimate of acts, whereas Rainzi simply does not
think that way. He is offering to share the universe with her. Our attention is
forced to consider what we mean by ‘the opposite sex’ or as Wendy Pearson
points out in chapter 10, ‘queer’. If both ‘sexes’ come with the same equipment and the same potential to penetrate and be penetrated, and gender has
become more about corporealty and acorporeality than male and female, it
is perfectly possible to argue that the whole discourse of humanity has been
queered in Schild’s Ladder.
These are very different creatures from ourselves, yet this is never explicitly spelled out. As James Gunn points out (Foreword), it is the layering,
embedding and shorthand endemic to sf that rescues the genre from didacticism. But this is not a mere negative: this essential technique (not unique
to sf, but very much more conscious in the genre than elsewhere) shifts
the real narrative of sf in directions unfamiliar to readers of the contemporary novel. In avoidance of didacticism Egan moves his fictional world
to centre stage. No novelist in mainstream fiction would expect description
to stand in for characterization, but sf, in making cognitive estrangement
storyable,12 insists that the world be treated as character (see chapters 10
and 11 in this volume). And here we turn to another characteristic of sf.
Much of early sf mistook weirdness for landscape, but some authors have
successfully elevated place to the level of character. This can be done in a
straightforward manner: in both Murray Leinster’s ‘The Lonely Planet’13
and Judith Moffett’s Pennterra (1987) the planets turn out to be alive. But
8
© in this web service Cambridge University Press
www.cambridge.org
Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-81626-7 - The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction
Edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn
Excerpt
More information
Introduction
more fundamental is the way in which a planet becomes intrinsically interesting, its story vital to the way in which the occupants live their lives:
Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974)
link political systems to landscape as does Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars
trilogy (see chapter 16 in this volume). Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia trilogy is
the masterpiece in this trend: the individuals who live through the seasons
on Helliconia merely occupy the ecological niches of story, and the protagonist is the planet. In Schild’s Ladder we must wait a long time for this
element of sf. The space station, fascinating though it is, does not capture the
imagination. It is the other side, the Bright, the alter-vacuum with its drifting vendeks and airflowers, which engages the senses of both readers and
protagonists, and from its discovery, the nature of the book shifts dramatically and again in ways which underscore the difference between sf and the
mainstream.
The Bright is discovered by Tchicaya and Mariama when they are trapped
in a space capsule together, and Mariama’s Qusp (her recorded personality)
is embedded in Tchicaya’s kidney. Science fiction likes its romance visceral.
It is not possible to get closer to someone than to ride inside their body, but
sf also likes the ambiguous and the ethereal – without bodies there cannot
be sex and sf remains one of the few genres in which intimate relations are
marginal. Schild’s Ladder is no exception. Sex is used to indicate the differences between the forms of human which now exist. Yann cannot take sex
seriously; its neural rewards are too unsubtle. Sex does function as a signifier
of friendship and community, but it is not where the romance lies. Tchicaya
and Mariama are attracted not to each other but to the glories of the cosmos,
to the real romance at the heart of any sf, the romance of the universe. For
sf is perhaps the last real bastion of Romantic fiction: sf protagonists fall in
love with the macrocosm. Where mainstream fiction writes of the intricacies
of inter-human relationships, the discourse of sf is about our relationship to
the world and the universe. The great events (wars, moon landings, famines)
or the great ideas (evolution, alien contact, immortality) are foregrounded.
In Schild’s Ladder, Tchicaya and Mariama are not conducting their affair
against the shaping force of a great discovery: they are conducting their
discovery of the universe against the unwelcome distraction of unresolved
emotions. It is this reversal of romance, the insistence that romance is out
there rather than internal, that frequently results in non-sf critics judging
sf deficient in characterization and emotion. At the very point of the novel
where one might expect our protagonists to fall into each other’s arms, they
decide not to bother. ‘Nothing could have lived up to four thousand years
of waiting. Except perhaps an original theorem’ (p. 246) or ‘The seed for a
universe, lying in the gutter’ (p. 248).
9
© in this web service Cambridge University Press
www.cambridge.org
Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-81626-7 - The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction
Edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn
Excerpt
More information
Introduction
Yet entwined with the wonder is a note of alienation. This is a cold romanticism in which we are forever excluded from our object of love, and
alienation is as much a part of sf as is the joy of discovery. The alienation
at the heart of sf is most evident in the sense of the uncaring universe exemplified in hard sf by the concept of the ‘cold equations’ (to use the title of
Tom Godwin’s sf story), those fixed rules that decide whether we live or die,
irrespective of whether we love – the universe is a harsh mistress. Schild’s
Ladder depends on the chill that emanates from the scientific superstructure
of the text: Tchicaya and Mariama may fall in love with the Bright, but it is
not sentient and like any ecology, will kill them if they do not adapt.
But sf also values alienation as the central element of character. Sf of the
1940s through the 1960s overused the idea of the alienated, isolated individual as genius – there is little question that it reflected the angst of generations
of bookish adolescents – and although the conceit is much diminished in sf,
the trope retains its power: isolation and alienation are as much a factor in
Schild’s Ladder as they are in that classic of sf angst, Van Vogt’s Slan (1940).
Tchicaya and Mariama have both succumbed to the idea that ‘different’ is
the same as superior. In their own adolescence, their self-absorption, their
conviction that their own lives were at the centre of the universal narratives,
led them to hide the discovery of alien life. As adults they meet unreconstructed homo sapiens who, having extended that distorted self-narrative
into an ideology, themselves demonstrate willingness to destroy that which
is other. One legacy of Marxism, feminism and postmodernism (see chapters
7, 8, 9) has been the ability to tell new stories, to inscribe the other into
the picture of the world. Part of Egan’s achievement in Schild’s Ladder is to
make the new world’s voice powerful. The universe, its equations still chilly,
corrects the anachronauts rather forcibly. We learn again that it is the idea
that is plot and character here, and it can survive the death of any of the
protagonists.
Science fiction is part of a polysemic discourse. Texts are vulnerable to
a multiplicity of interpretations, each of which produces a different landscape of sf, as reflected in the numerous academic and ‘fan’ canons which
have emerged over the past eight decades. As critics are increasingly drawn
from communities of fans, even the once hard divisions between the ‘fan’
canon (Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke) and the ‘academic’ canon (Dick, Le Guin,
Ballard) blur. Each of our contributors would draw Egan’s book differently.
It can be read as a space opera, as hard sf, through and with an eye to
biological speculation. Helen Merrick and Wendy Pearson might pick up
on the attempts Egan has made to go beyond the heterosexual imperative,
while maintaining a binary structure for social relations. The radical shift
in perception results in a configuration of sexuality not susceptible to our
10
© in this web service Cambridge University Press
www.cambridge.org